Hallway’s full of suits, two of them, one of whom, an immaculate, towering shvartze, ports his luggage, overpacked, to the hall’s furthest elevator, service, while Arschstrong, accompanied by another foreigner, with his pleasantries he must be Mitteleuropan, he thinks, takes the residential, whose scamp operator’s been financed to take the remainder of the night off, before being forced, bound, gagged then broomcloseted. While descending, this foreign goy in the pinched fedora hands over to Arschstrong an envelope in which as agreed are the surveilled, images disagreeably focused of him and Pop-Pop, naked, engaged in a joy named in memory of that urbis that once neighbored Gomorrah, which has no sin left to its name. A limousine idles in the drive, ahead of another, this second limo shabbier, scratched at the doors, fender dimpled and two lights smashed out, the latter plateless, too, though registered to the federal government. All shaved skull and sunglass pincenez, a voluminous leather duster over his suit and tie, which are black, the shvarzte opens the limousine’s door, Arschstrong simpers inside, the limos pull out, in poor, skidding formation, disappear into one another then into pitch, whose direction is always northeast. One limousine to go further, though, as north and as east as the Delaware and the mouth of the Parkway, all the way back again to the state of Benjamin’s birth, which is Joysey, if a Garden itself then a paradise barren, Eden bereft — a scrubscape of low malls and gnarled, haggard, known better days pine; while the other limo relents earlier, as if it can’t take the cold or the time, takes the turn from the lightless interstate to Washington’s rural if still subdivided environs, Arschstrong in its rear sucking fingers, the attaché held on his shivering knees. He’s liveried to an impressive rancher vacated upon this clear and bright Sunday morning, with his kinder and their own out tending to church (even Arschstrong once married, for what he thought of as normalcy, only protection), at a special vigil this Sabbath never again, a service of solidarity being held for the victims of recent events, and so he waits, sits on their porch and wastes himself in wicker alongside the bowl for the water and the bowl for the food of their dog, who’s absent itself, scavenging bodies. He’ll ask to stay, for acceptance, to live here, spin out his span however long it’d be, and please not too revolute painful. An hour later a metallic gray minivan makes time through the artificially greened, rolling in it Development and even before it manages and on problem brakes to slow to a stop, grandkinder — his, he realizes — spring through the windows, hope they’re already open; kisses one for each then one for the wife of his son (reminder, ask him for her name), a handshake, maybe even a hug for her husband who’d rejected him now returned if too late and inside, Arschstrong nodding, as if gathering the tense urge of the lips; he lightens himself in their kitchen, atop their table synthetically topped, mounding a mint of money before he falls into a chair he’s sure is there but isn’t and so onto the floor where he remains sprawled, and weeping.
First and false, this day of new beginnings, up and fortified with bran for brunch, a sit on the toilet, girded loins not quite proverbial, fresh resolve along with an argument against such headlined in memoriam above the folds of the morning papers. To unlock Benjamin’s door at seven sharp, the same hour at which he’d free his late wife His MomMom, to put her to work, daily tasks since his lover’s, or once; to wake Him and say, another day — the clock poured in fresh sidewalk concrete to still history at now, to sink the past in the ocean of present…getup, washup, dressup, eatup — over the fruitplate, a diet, we’ll talk strategy for the lawyer, our appointment’s on Monday at nine.
Into the bedroom and instead of Benjamin in bed, His MomMom’s — there’s no outsized infant lump or toddling lunk, but a shriveled pucker of a person with a head shaped like an egg, as it’s brilliantly bald, set with eyes and nose and a mouth like the cracks made by the earliest of beaks. Or, it’s a worm, wriggling that head as round as the world, and as swollen. Its glabrousness goading. Who else, PopPop thinks, what else to suspect: maybe one of the more senile residents around here, old Mister Alzheimer, perhaps, wandered home to the wrong unit, it’s happened before, it’ll happen again but he won’t recall when. PopPop checks for a wheelchair, a walker…tries it on, this variant of take my cane, hold it or, I’m just happy to see you, then laughs at the thought, offers him a sleeve, a cuff of the hand; and, as he extends himself as if to shake, he can’t help himself, he begins tapping a finger as if to break with nail this squirming shell and emerge from it a SonSon.
